HTC Desire 600 dual sim review: One in two

Introduction

With dual SIM still more or less a niche feature and considering the Desire line has been sliding down the ranks and losing value, people will have more than enough reasons to give the HTC Desire 600 dual sim the cold shoulder. Will it be deserved? Well, at least on paper, this phone may be worth of the benefit of the doubt.

It's not a name that has a sexy ring to it but the HTC Desire 600 dual sim has the right genes, being a direct descendant of the One. More often than not dual-SIM designs lack inspiration, being a replica of existing devices with an added SIM card slot. This, fortunately, is not the case with the HTC Desire 600.

HTC Desire 600 dual sim official photos

Of course, an extra SIM slot often involves compromise elsewhere -the HTC Desire 600 had to settle for the Snapdragon 200 chipset with four Cortex-A5 cores running at 1.2GHz and 1GB of RAM. This is Qualcomm's baseline product for 2013. We can't wait to see how it performs with Sense UI, but we'll get to that a bit later on.

For now, here's a quick rundown of the smartphone's key strengths and most notable weaknesses.

Key features

• GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 - SIM 1 & SIM 2, HSDPA 900 / 2100 SIM 1
• 4.5" 540 x 960 pixel Super LCD2 capacitive touchscreen with 245ppi
• Android OS v4.1.2 Jelly Bean with Sense UI 5.0
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 chipset: quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A5, 1 GB RAM, Adreno 203 GPU
• 8 MP autofocus camera with 1/3.2'' sensor size, 2µm pixel size; LED flash
• 720p video recording @ 30fps with HDR mode and stereo audio, slow-mo 720p@60fps video,
• 1.6MP front-facing camera, 720p video recording
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA; Wireless TV-out
• GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS
• 8GB of built-in storage
• microSD card slot
• Bluetooth v4.0
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Accelerometer and proximity sensor
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• Front-mounted stereo speakers with BoomSound tech
• FM Radio

Main disadvantages

• Relatively slow chipset
• Disappointing stills and video, no Full HD video recording
• Poor video codec support out of the box
• No 3G support on the secondary SIM card

Perhaps a 720p screen and 1080p videos would've been too much for the entry-level Snapdragon 200 chipset to handle. Other than that though, HTC has really tried to maximize the feature set of the HTC Desire 600 dual sim. The front-facing BoomSound speakers promise flagship-grade audio quality and, unlike the One and One mini, the Desire 600 offers a microSD card slot and a removable battery. The Desire 600 dual sim is still pleasantly thin at 9.2mm.

HTC Desire 600 dual sim live photos

Now that we've caught a glimpse of the pros and cons of the Desire 600 dual sim, let's see how it fares in real life. We're back right after the break with a full physical.